Review: Free as a Bird (2024)

Aditya Khude’s short film Free as a Bird unfolds between the apparent openness of a maximum city and the compressed interiors that sustain its dreams, where a lower-middle-class family of five shares a domestic space that is as much a physical constraint as it is an emotional one. The film remains attentive to this spatial limitation, allowing it to shape the rhythms of daily life and the fragile aspirations that persist within it.

Raj (Siddharth Menon) and Priya (Parna Pethe) mark their anniversary with a tentative escape to the beach. It’s an act that is less a romantic outing than a brief claim to privacy otherwise denied to them. The police raid that interrupts this moment registers not as regulation but as intrusion, exposing how precarious their access to public space remains. What follows next is an awkward bargaining that results in a failed attempt at bribery, and the slow, dispiriting passage to the police station. The sequence accrues its weight through small humiliations, where the loss of dignity unfolds in increments rather than spectacle. As they return home, still reeling from the shock of the unprecedented incident, their earlier ease gives way to a marked restraint. The family dinner unfolds in near silence. Its stillness carries a palpable weight. The shared space grows charged with unspoken awareness, as if the episode at the beach has altered the atmosphere of the household without ever being directly acknowledged.

It is only later, on the terrace, that the film allows for a degree of release. Raj’s unease leads him to the terrace, where the open air offers a provisional contrast to the confinement below. His non- verbal exchange with his father avoids easy consolation. Instead, it gestures toward a continuity of experience and an understanding that disappointment is neither exceptional nor easily resolved. Rather, it is quietly absorbed and endured. The moment does not resolve the embarrassment so much as soften its edges.

The title of the film carries an irony that the narrative does not underline. Freedom here appears not as a tangible condition but as a fleeting sensation, glimpsed in transient spaces before receding. The beach and the terrace suggest openness, yet neither can sustain it. What remains is a life shaped by negotiation—of space, of desire, of self-respect. The final image of the film, with the tall high-rises of the metropolis, brings a sharp contrast, situating these fragile moments of intimacy against an urban landscape defined by exclusion as much as aspiration.

The film’s strength lies in its refusal to amplify its material. It stays close to the textures of ordinary experience, trusting that an accumulation of small details, hesitations, silences, and aborted gestures conveys what more demonstrative storytelling might overstate. The performances from Siddharth Menon, Parna Pethe, and Ashish Vidyarthi give the film a grounded emotional texture, anchoring its quiet observations in lived-in authenticity.

If its trajectory recalls Hardik Mehta’s The Affair (2017), it is perhaps because both films engage with the question of private, physical, and emotional space for couples in Mumbai. Yet within that shared concern, Free as a Bird locates moments of quiet precision, where the after-effects of a single incident continue to echo beyond its immediate circumstances.

Free as a Bird premiered at the 2024 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and has since travelled widely on the festival circuit. It was recently screened as part of the MAMI Independent free weekly programme.